One of the nice little additions to the data client services in Silverlight 2 is the removal of the need to drop out of Visual Studio to do some proxy code generation. Prior to Silverlight 2 release, if you wanted to consume an ADO.NET Data Service (the artist formerly known as Astoria), you had to drop into a command line and execute something like:

While that isn’t difficult, it just wasn’t convenient as a developer productivity workflow. I mean who wants to have to click and type more than you have to, right? After all, ADO.NET Data Service (alright forget it, I’m calling it Astoria) endpoints are services right? And Visual Studio does have this thing called Add Service Reference?

Alas, now we don’t have to use a command-line anymore. With Silverlight 2 and Visual Studio tools, you now can use the service reference capability I’d like to show you a screenshot, but it’s not like the dialog window is any different than other service references, so I’ll save me and you the bandwidth. But try it out. Take your project, add a reference to your Astoria service.